Hanan Al-Shaykh (Arabic: حنان الشيخ) is a Lebanese journalist, novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. Born into a conservative Shia' Muslim family, she received her primary education in Beirut …
The Brazilian author PAULO COELHO was born in 1947 in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Before dedicating his life completely to literature, he worked as theatre director and actor, lyricist and journalist.…
Ray Douglas Bradbury was an American author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers, he worked in a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, my…
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was an American playwright and writer. She was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Her best-known work, the play A Raisin in the Su…
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the most influential and emotionally powerful authors of the 20th century. Born in Boston, Massachusetts,…
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (谷崎 潤一郎) was a Japanese author, and one of the major writers of modern Japanese literature, perhaps the most popular Japanese novelist after Natsume Sōseki.
Thomas Lanier Williams III, better known by the nickname Tennessee Williams, was a major American playwright of the twentieth century who received many of the top theatrical awards for his work. He mo…
Audre Lorde was a revolutionary Black feminist. Lorde's poetry was published very regularly during the 1960s — in Langston Hughes' 1962 New Negro Poets, USA; in several foreign anthologies; and in bla…
Hisham Matar was born in New York City, where his father was working for the Libyan delegation to the United Nations. When he was three years old, his family went back to Tripoli, Libya, where he spen…
Martinique-born poet, playwright, and politician Aimé Fernand Césaire contributed to the development of the concept of negritude; his primarily surrealist works include The Miracle Weapons (1946) …
Nawal El Saadawi (Arabic: نوال السعداوي) was born in 1931, in a small village outside Cairo. Unusually, she and her brothers and sisters were educated together, and she graduated from the University o…
László Krasznahorkai is a Hungarian novelist and screenwriter who is known for critically difficult and demanding novels, often labelled as postmodern, with dystopian and bleak melancholic themes. He …
The Sudanese writer al-Tayyib Salih (Arabic: الطيب صالح)has been described as the "genius of the modern Arabic novel." He has lived abroad for most of his life, yet his fiction is firmly rooted in the…
Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian writer. Acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories, she was also a journalist. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, she w…
Suad Amiry (Arabic: سعاد العامري) is a Palestinian writer and architect has been living in Ramallah since 1981. Born in Damascus, Amiry grew up between Amman, Damascus, Beirut and Cairo. She studied ar…
Tessa Hadley is the author of Sunstroke and Other Stories, and the novels The Past, Late in the Day and Clever Girl. She lives in Cardiff, Wales, and teaches literature and creative writing at Bath Sp…
Tahmima Anam is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, and anthropologist. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Granta Best Young British Novelist, and winner of a Commonwealt…
Novels of Samuel Barclay Beckett, Irish writer, include Murphy in 1938 and Malone Dies in 1951; a wider audience know his absurdist plays, such as Waiting for Godot in 1952 and Krapp's …
Rajaa Alsanea (Arabic: رجاء الصانع; variant spelling Rajaa al-Sanea)is a Saudi writer who became famous through her novel Girls of Riyadh, or Banat al-Riyadh. The book was first published in Lebanon …
Sunjeev Sahota is a British novelist. Sahota was born in 1981 in Derby, and his family moved to Chesterfield when he was seven years old. His paternal grandparents had emigrated to Britain from the Pu…
Naguib Mahfouz (Arabic author profile: نجيب محفوظ) was an Egyptian writer who won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. He published over 50 novels, over 350 short stories, dozens of movie scripts, and…
Ghassan Kanafani was a Palestinian journalist, fiction writer, and a spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Kanafani died at th…
Pip Drysdale is the bestselling author of five novels. She grew up in Africa, Canada, and Australia, became an adult in New York and London, and lives on a steady diet of coffee, dreams, and literatur…
Banu Mushtaq (ಬಾನು ಮುಷ್ತಾಕ್, born 1948) is an activist, lawyer and writer from the southern Indian state of Karnataka. She writes in the Kannada language and her works have also been published in Urdu…
